Oksiloff, Assenka. Narratives of Modernism

a series of “cross-illuminations.”
Benjamin’s Kafka criticism confronts this accepted mode of interpretation and suggests that the interactions between his texts and Kafka’s can be understood in terms of a series of “cross-illuminations.” [Oksiloff 168]...

a failure of the original
Any translation which sets out to reproduce meaning in another language is bound to fail and this has to do with a failure of the original. [Oksiloff 170]...

translation exists in a more “exalted’ state
Thus, the property that is most blatant in a translation, the slippage between symbol and symbolized, revels something about the original. It is for this reason that Benjamin claims that the translation exists in a more “exalted’ state than...

the meaning lies in the unfolding itself
The flower’s unfolding does not mark the end of a historical process confirmed thorough one truth. Rather, the meaning lies in the unfolding itself, in the constantly changing contours and folds which extend beyond the flower’s “natur...

Benjamin’s interpretative text repeats Kafka’s gesture
The failure is never simply that of the modernist text in opposition to history, but of a text that realizes how it is the very material production of history. If Benjamin’s interpretative text repeats Kafka’s gesture, it is with the...

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